You can't fix bad sectors. All you can do is mark them as bad in the low level format so they don't get used. Low level format takes a long time.

You should not have to redo a low level format unless you physically damage the disk, which means a sudden shock while it is accessing. Disks park the heads over an unused area when shutting down so shocks in transport don't damage the used area.

The other reason for getting extra bad sectors would be the disk is dying on you or you have a controller/cable problem.

Can anyone tell Robin (or even MFG) if they also have used the HDD Regenerator utility?

I am running it through on my 120GB Maxtor ATM and this is on my XP3000+ machine with 1GB RAM and I started the floppy off about 24 hours ago....

it is presently showing 72 odd GB done and about 7k Sectors repaired. My only concern might be that I know it is logging it's work to the floppy, and I am wondering if anyone has ever found what happens when that log fills up! Also if anyone has any experience of how much longer this can run! I am truly amazed at the length of time taken - although unconcerned - it could take a week if it wanted - what matters to me is if it does a good enough job for me to take a backup of my data dir from the HD.

Look forward to hearing back - if there are any users out there... seems like my forum searching on a couple of issues I have had lately are leading to some historic resurrections - hope no one minds...

Funny that - Lord just shoved such a CD at me with that on it! This machine I like to keep up and running for my work configuraiton during the week - but if I am not working this weekend (would be nice, I was last!) then I may shove it in and give it a spin - will report back if I do, but ATM my SMART is not failing the drive and TrueImage could back it up (with one prompt for a retry) - only problem left was DriveImage failed so to do...